Eat Your Young

Eat Your Young is the second full-length album from Minneapolis-based
electro-rock band Solid Gold. It's a slow-burning set of skittish
synths, glassy beats, ripple effect riffs, and melancholic melodies that
leave you wondering what left a trail of scar tissue deep within the
group’s core trio (frontman Zack Coulter and multi-instrumentalists
Matthew Locher and Adam Hurlburt).

Only it’s not that simple, not as easy as reducing a record to a series
of bad relationships and broken hearts. Depending on who you ask, Eat
Your Young is inspired by everything from lucid dreams to existential
dread to the way we often wander through life in a catatonic state. And
yet, it’s not a hopeless listen; more like an album that maintains its
mood for 40 minutes and leaves an impression as deeply ingrained in your
subconscious as the nostalgia-triggering memories that earned saudade
its own national holiday in Brazil.

“We’ve never been motivated by making records,” explains Locher. “We’re
driven by making something beautiful—capturing a moment in our lives
that can translate to any place or time.”

That much is clear as Eat Your Young creeps across your speakers like a
quiet storm, ebbing and flowing at every turn, from the exorcised demons
of “The Pendulum” to the bookending outbursts of “Shock Notice” and “In
the Hollows.” All of which sounds incredibly confident despite the
record’s shades of darkness. That’s because Solid Gold spent years
developing their musical and lyrical concepts, beginning with their
smoky club formation at the University of Wisconsin—Locher and Coulter
were in the same architecture class—and becoming much more of a serious
pursuit once the group moved to Minneapolis and tracked their 2008
debut, Bodies of Water.

Eat Your Young brings to mind everything from the gleaming skyscrapers
of Blade Runner to the dimly lit streets of a midnight drive. Or as
Locher puts it, alluding to the band’s push and pull dynamics,
“Dystopian futures, wrought with oppression and rich with struggle, just
seem to fit our sound best.”